Category: Cartoons and Comics

I’ve just been looking through Spread Ubuntu, that bastion of advertising media for Ubuntu LoCo teams which allows us to share designs and such.

I noticed something which made me smile, a long time ago I made a poster for the Massachusetts 8.10 party and it was commissioned from Mimloy a Thai artist from deviantArt. She kindly made it and released it under CC-BY-SA for me. So I made modifications and did my editing and produced this. (see left)

So checking art I was glad to see this work by Leogg, a Spanish Ubuntu person who designed/released some great Ubuntu CD covers for 9.10 (1 year later) and some of them clearly show a derivative of the original Ubuntu girl from the above poster. Changed, made better, made to fit, given a body and split into a number of personalities.

Isn’t it great? Score another point for creative commons freedom. Now on an interesting note technically each derivative work should attribute all the people who’ve worked on it so far, but that’s actually hard to do because you may not know everyone who did (I doubt leogg knew Mimloy was the original artist) and it could ruin the artwork to have a million names printed on it each time. I’ve not yet come up with a good answer for how to solve these problems.

Good news, today we’ve released chapter 04 of the ever wonderful Ubunchu manga first published in Ascii magazine in Japan. With translations from Vlad and editing by Arturo, this chapter is cute, cuddly and informative. Check it out!

This chapter is all about the lovely Risa creating a short comic and the discussions the systems administration club is having about licensing. Wonderfully done by Seotch san as always and I hope you enjoy it too.

I just found this random image from an image search, but I’m not sure where it’s from. Or even what it says, but I presume it’s something to do with “Linux” and windows vista. Although interestingly the first word is Canonical.

This is a commission I got done by a new artist, ~Miayah over on deviantArt, it’s an Ubunchu based image based in the manga style. Akane’s looking out the window thinking about the work that she’s doing on her Ubuntu based computer. (or Debian)

It’s a lovely work and is downloadable in SVG and rendered in inkscape. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike.

I’ve been plodding through the graphics for the “How to Ask Smart Questions” guide, which coincidentally will help people ask questions with the same quality that Akane does in chapter 03 of Ubunchu. Some of the graphics I’ve been playing with are for illustrating various parts of the guide and so I asked my good acquaintance C-Quel to draw me up a quick SVG image of Risa to help us through.

The problem was I feel, was that the style of the guide I wanted to make was more conservative than C-Quel’s style, I also wanted to make sure I wasn’t suggesting that only women in dresses have problems. So I set about modifying the SVG to produce some more professional, slightly more western eyes and clothes.

Great news, we’ve finished work on translating the excellent Chapter 03 of the Ubunchu Manga.

This chapter tells the story of our system admin club members negotiating their way through the Ubuntu Forums, will they find geeks replaying with RTFM posts or will they find a kinder and more helpful community. And why has Akane, our skilled hacker, never posted to a forum before?

Some comics are so good that they are compelling, the “City of Reality” is a story about a world connected tangentially to other worlds and everyone in Reality is nice, realistic, polite, supportive and understanding to one another. Now take a being who has come from one of these other worlds, he’s come to join the supers of Reality who help out and defeat any bad guys. The problem is that the city has been so crime free for so long that the job has generally fallen to kids who want a bit of an adventure.

Will they be able to cope with some new challenges? Will our new friend be able to cope with the seemingly maddening selfless attitudes of the populace? Check it out twice a month:

I love this comic, it’s very well drawn, it’s got fantastic writing and a charm I can’t quite place. The serious side is for me the mental experiment of what a world would be like if people were genuinely nice. Would it be interesting? would it be sustainable? Could one selfish person wreak the whole thing?

Like any good philosophy of social interaction, the comic discovers that being nice has a lot of advantages; but people in our world aren’t able to take advantage of them because we don’t know enough about other people to be able to trust them. So most people tend to form a “nice where possible” attitude that is a genuine attempt to be socially cohesive. It’s also true that unlike people in Reality, we are arrogant-centric and caught up in our own petty egos, trying to overcome our boundless fear of being wrong should be a major goal of any nice person.